On Friday, November 16, 2018 at 5:00:06 AM UTC-5, Jim White wrote:
Our experience with Distance Handicap Tasks is that they dramatically
reduce land outs, especially with the lower handicapped non turbo gliders..

Easy to set, easy to score, see www.handicaptask.uk for details. Also take
a look at https://www.soaringspot.com/en_gb/icl-final-2018/
for an example. I directed this comp over a weekend. The only land outs
were two pundits in JS1c's pushing too hard.

Jim

How is this approach better than turn-area (AAT/TAT) tasks with large turn circles? Often the ratio of the maximum to minimum distance in such a task is 2:1 or larger, allowing a wide range of glider performance. The required distance is implicitly related to glider performance via the required minimum time on task. One difference I can see is that in a traditional turn area task those flying higher performance gliders are allowed to fly the shorter distance if they so choose. That would be a desired choice for those who end up flying the task at low speed despite the theoretical performance of the glider. It allows them to still get scored as having completed the task, albeit at low speed. Also, if bad weather makes a turnpoint inaccessible, one can just nick the circle, and either fly deeper into other circles or accept the under-minimum-time penalty. With the distance handicap approach, higher-performance gliders may be forced further into bad weather..